November 20th, 2019
This morning I had an 8am sales call with a potential Pigeon user.
He was a performer from Vienna, Austria who needs a solution like Pigeon to manage all of his bookings, since they all mostly come through a WordPress form and into his email. Then, he has a ton of back and forth to close the deal, set the event, etc. Lots of email work.
When I started talking to him over the call I realized that he is an "A1" customer. By "A1", I mean he is my ideal customer. And it kind of caught me off guard.
One issue with having an "audience" like mine is that a lot of my leads/customers "just want to try a cool tool" or "want to start a business". It often feels like I'm wasting time with people like that, because they don't really need the product, and they end up churning.
But this potential customer was different, I was excited and I wanted to make sure I go above and beyond to land him.
He wanted a calendar integration, which is not something we do, but the other solutions don't do it either. What we do offer is Zapier, but we don't have a lot of Zaps yet. In order to impress him, I told him that I would personally set up a Zapier integration for him that would create calendar events from Pigeon.
So I spent much of the day configuring triggers in Zapier (needed to set this up anyways) and got it working! Then, I recorded a personal screencast to set up the whole thing, as that customer is not super technically savvy. You can watch it here.
Maybe that was a bad use of my time? But it felt right. Maybe I'm desperate for customers...?
Sometimes founders will explain their growth was "because of our excellent customer support". I used to think that was bullshit. But lately, I'm starting to think that's the best marketing in the world. It's just not flashy, trendy, or very tangible.
When a potential customer is personally struggling with another tool and getting lame customer support, you can come in and beat them every time with a decent tool and excellent customer support.
That can make all the difference and they can become a customer for life. And they'll tell 10 of their friends.
He was a performer from Vienna, Austria who needs a solution like Pigeon to manage all of his bookings, since they all mostly come through a WordPress form and into his email. Then, he has a ton of back and forth to close the deal, set the event, etc. Lots of email work.
When I started talking to him over the call I realized that he is an "A1" customer. By "A1", I mean he is my ideal customer. And it kind of caught me off guard.
One issue with having an "audience" like mine is that a lot of my leads/customers "just want to try a cool tool" or "want to start a business". It often feels like I'm wasting time with people like that, because they don't really need the product, and they end up churning.
But this potential customer was different, I was excited and I wanted to make sure I go above and beyond to land him.
He wanted a calendar integration, which is not something we do, but the other solutions don't do it either. What we do offer is Zapier, but we don't have a lot of Zaps yet. In order to impress him, I told him that I would personally set up a Zapier integration for him that would create calendar events from Pigeon.
So I spent much of the day configuring triggers in Zapier (needed to set this up anyways) and got it working! Then, I recorded a personal screencast to set up the whole thing, as that customer is not super technically savvy. You can watch it here.
Maybe that was a bad use of my time? But it felt right. Maybe I'm desperate for customers...?
Sometimes founders will explain their growth was "because of our excellent customer support". I used to think that was bullshit. But lately, I'm starting to think that's the best marketing in the world. It's just not flashy, trendy, or very tangible.
When a potential customer is personally struggling with another tool and getting lame customer support, you can come in and beat them every time with a decent tool and excellent customer support.
That can make all the difference and they can become a customer for life. And they'll tell 10 of their friends.